However, Apple made some changes to the macOS installer starting in macOS Sierra 10.12.4 which broke the method I was using to build the installers. Recently though, I figured out that I could use Apple’s createinstallmedia tool to help me with building installers for Mac virtual machines again. After a substantial re-write, create_macos_vm_install_dmg is able to create bootable disk images for virtual machines running macOS Sierra, High Sierra and Mojave.

One change from the previous version of the create_macos_vm_install_dmg script is that the resulting installer no longer runs an automated installation. Instead, it will be necessary to follow the prompts to select the language and drive to install the OS onto. For more details, please see below the jump.

Now that Apple File System (APFS) is available and the default file system on macOS High Sierra, a different procedure must be used in order to resize the APFS-formatted boot drive of an existing virtual machine. For more details, see below the jump.

My fork of the auto-create script is designed to create and configure virtual machines with Apple operating systems as the guest OS, hosted on a VMware ESXi server running on Apple hardware. The script assumes that the virtual machines are built using copied VMDK disk files, where the VMDK files are generated by AutoDMG and vfuse. For more details, see below the jump.

Like this:

As part of working on a project recently, I ran into an unexpected problem with ESXi-hosted Mac VMs. For these VMs, I was creating VMDK files from AutoDMG-generated disk images, using vfuse to convert the disk image into a VM with ESXi-compatible VMDK disk image files.

3. Upload the VMDK files to a convenient location on my ESXi server
4. Set up a new VM, using copies of uploaded VMDK files for the VM boot disk.
5. Resize the new VM to the desired size using VMware’s vmkfstools utility.
6. Start up the VM.

After logging in, I ran the following command to enable macOS to recognize and use the unallocated space from the VM resizing:

diskutil resizeVolume / R

Normally, this command is able to do a live re-sizing of the boot partition to use all available unallocated space. However, this time the re-sizing process failed and the following error was displayed:

That said, I still want to be able to create macOS installer disk images for VMware Fusion and ESXi, so I’ve forked create_vmware_osx_install_dmg into a new script named create_macos_vm_install_dmg. create_macos_vm_install_dmg will generate stock OS installer disk images for the following OS versions:

Mac OS X 10.7.x

OS X 10.8.x

OS X 10.9.x

OS X 10.10.x

OS X 10.11.x

OS X 10.12.x

This script does not use a third-party package, so it is able to build a macOS 10.12.4 installer disk image. For more details, see below the jump.